Social networks are becoming prolific in today's digital society. For example, instant messaging and chat applications enable a user to create a social network of friends or buddies. The friends may be classified into types or groups such as friends, family, co-workers, and the like. As another example, social networking websites such as MySpace allow users to create social networks of friends with which they are enabled to communicate.
Social networks are emerging as a means for recommending media content among users. Commonly owned and assigned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/484,130, entitled P2P NETWORK FOR PROVIDING REAL TIME MEDIA RECOMMENDATIONS, discloses an exemplary social network based media recommendation system, which is referred to herein as a social media recommendation network. One issue with such systems is that the number of recommendations received by any one user can significantly decrease when another user in the social media recommendation network becomes unavailable. Thus, there is a need for a system and method for eliminating or alleviating significant reduction in recommendation flow in a social media recommendation network when a user becomes unavailable, while preserving the natural flow of recommendations through the system.